Construction activities performed by workers are usually repetitive and physically demanding. Execution of such tasks in awkward postures can strain their body parts and can result in fatigue, injuries or in severe cases permanent disabilities. The number of reported cases every year is in the thousands. Among these injuries, back injuries and Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorder (WMSD) are th...

We consider the problem of assisting vulnerable people and their carers to reduce the occurrence, and concomitant consequences, of accidents in the home. A wireless sensor network employing multiple sensing and event detection modalities and distributed processing is proposed for smart home monitoring applications. Distributed vision-based analysis is used to detect occupant’s posture, and feat...

This study evaluates how different culinary spatula (turning shovel) designs affect cooking performance during stir-frying. A straight-handled spatula (0°) and three bent-handled spatulas (15°, 30° and 45°) were evaluated across two handle length levels (25 cm and 30 cm). The criterion measures included food-frying efficiency, work posture and subjective rating of perceived discomfort. In a lab...

Robotica / Volume 29 / Issue 02 / March 2011, pp 245 253 DOI: 10.1017/S026357471000010X, Published online: 30 April 2010 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S026357471000010X How to cite this article: Jingzhou (James) Yang, Tim Marler and Salam Rahmatalla (2011). Multi-objective optimization-based method for kinematic posture prediction: development and validation. Robo...

Gait and posture evaluation in rehabilitation ii " The natural condition of the bodies is not the rest, but the movement " Galileu Gait and posture evaluation in rehabilitation

Healthcare environments are considered an important scenario where new technologies play an important role in improving the rehabilitation process. Many software applications provide a way to rehabilitate patients and some of them also provide a degree of customization. Nevertheless, the physiotherapist is not always able to create new exercises and adapt them to the needs of a wide range of di...

In this paper, we describe our pioneering work in developing speech synthesis beyond the Text-To-Speech paradigm. We introduce tangible speech synthesis as an alternate way of envisioning how artificial speech content can be produced. Tangible speech synthesis refers to the ability, for a given system, to provide some physicality and interactivity to important speech production parameters. We p...

In this study, we intend to show the basis of a general legged locomotion controller with the ability to integrate both posture and rhythmic motion controls and shift continuously from one control method to the other according to the walking speed. The rhythmic motion of each leg in the sagittal plane is generated by a single leg controller which controls the swing-to-stance and stance-toswing ...

This paper explains a novel approach to human interactive e-learning systems using head posture images. Students’ face and hair information are used to identify a human presence and estimate the gaze direction. We then define the human-computer interaction level and test the definition using ten students and seventy different posture images. The experimental results show that head posture image...